When Gr\u00e9gory Pierrot talks about growing up in northeastern France near Luxembourg and Germany, he uses the word \u201cAmerican\u201d at least a half dozen times.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve had a long personal relationship with American culture,\u201d he says, describing how as a boy he\u2019d listen to American music and write down as many words as he could catch to translate into French, so he could figure out what was being said.<\/p>\n
Now an associate professor of English<\/a> at UConn Stamford<\/a> who teaches African American literature, Pierrot says he\u2019s been a student of American culture \u2013 its literature, music, and history – since he was a teenager, even as his methods have turned more intellectual.<\/p>\n His latest project for Rot Bo Krik, \u201cIt was Nation Time: Fictions of African American Revolution,\u201d<\/a> which looks at African American literature during the Black Power era and how readers of French translations received the works, might be the best way to encapsulate all that has intrigued him since his youth.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m very interested in the way literature, music, and film – all those things that may seem less serious than politics or unrelated to it \u2013 actually convey most of what people think they know about a given moment or given political period,\u201d Pierrot says. \u201cIdeas are conveyed in those texts, in those songs, and in those films, and they have much more of an impact on us than scholarly studies or political speeches even.\u201d<\/p>\n Pierrot says the French, even though an ocean away, are fascinated by what happened in America in the mid-1960s to 1970s, those volatile years after Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts took effect, the Black Panthers took rise, and Martin Luther King Jr. took his last breath.<\/p>\n Writers including John A. Williams, best known for \u201cThe Man Who Cried I Am\u201d; Chester Himes, who wrote a series of \u201cHarlem Detective\u201d novels; and Sam Greenlee, author of \u201cThe Spook Who Sat by the Door\u201d told fictionalized but compelling accounts of what being Black in the United States was like.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is such a fraught moment in American history, with fraught ideas in American politics,\u201d Pierrot says. \u201cThis idea of a \u2018Black Revolution,\u2019 while it wasn\u2019t greatly popular, it was in the air. So, when novels like these came out everybody would be talking about them.\u201d<\/p>\n Through the years, for instance, Williams\u2019 novel \u201cSons of Darkness, Sons of Light,\u201d which imagined the outset of such a revolution, and his \u201cCaptain Blackman,\u201d which traces Black soldiers\u2019 contributions to the Army, have been forgotten \u2013 along with so many other works, even as those stories echo in the events of today.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s shocking just how much the plots in these novels often sound like they could have been written yesterday,\u201d Pierrot says. \u201cIn quite a few of these, either the premise or one of the important events in the plot has to do with young African American boys being shot by police for no reason. Others have to do with the rise of extreme right-wing politics. To that extent, they are very much of this moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, France and the U.S. have been connected since long before the American Revolution gave this country its independence from Britain, and France gifted the Statue of Liberty to celebrate a century of liberty.<\/p>\n France has been the place where African Americans, particularly artists, have fled when wanting or needing to escape racism in North America, Pierrot explains, as France, perhaps infamously, prides itself as being a place where racism doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n \u201cRacism in France was different enough than what was happening in the U.S. that it felt like relief for African Americans who still get treated very differently than other members of the African diaspora in France,\u201d Pierrot says. \u201cHistorically, to put it simply, it\u2019s often been easier to be African American than to be Black and French in France.\u201d<\/p>\n In research for the project, funded as part of a year-long fellowship<\/a> from the UConn Humanities Institute<\/a>, Pierrot says that even though he\u2019s built a career absorbed in the literature of this period, he found himself fascinated recently by Malcolm X\u2019s connection to France, which remains largely unknown among citizens there despite pop culture references to him.<\/p>\n In the 10 years before the Black activist was assassinated in 1965, despite his growth in the U.S. as a name known around the dinner table, he was mentioned only a handful of times in the French newspaper of record.<\/p>\n